《Let There be Darkness》中的设定的收集（1）(9)

世界消失了——一个无边无际的宇宙生动的景象旋转着出现。所有的时间和空间似乎是一个紧凑而无限的整体，受制于惊人的简单法则。星星像尘埃一样，数量众多，旋转并合并成巨大的螺旋云。地球过去的盛会，以及十亿个其他世界的过去，似乎在一个无维度的背景中被详细地展示出来。在那一瞬间，朱蒂理解了银河帝国，它包括银河系的千亿个太阳，而地球只是其中的一个小微粒，还有同样广阔的Zarr帝国，它的第一批征服触须横跨黑色星际海湾。一瞬间，她就感觉到了这两个巨大的星际帝国历史上的亮点。
7. And back of it all she sensed a surging, cosmic panorama vast beyond anything she had ever been taught to conceive. Her mind's eye glimpsed metallic armies marching from horizon to horizon across expanses too great to be the plains of any earth-sized world -- ships miles long that blasted their way across curved space on arcs of glaring flame -- forests of gleaming towers that bore down on cowering cities, hurling lightning-like shafts of violet energy before them, while the alien-architectured buildings shook to their ponderous advance -- stars that pulsed grandly in vast explosion, destroying whole systems of worlds in their leisurely, irresistible expansion -- legions of winged, lobster-bodied beings that swept across inconceivable immensities of space-time, bearing glittering metal canisters in their jointed claws. She sensed the awful presence of beings even mightier than the Galactics or the Zarr -- monstrous, mental pulsings here and there amid the cosmos suggesting the existence of living-things too terrific and alien to be humanly comprehended. One was near the center of the Andromeda nebula -- a black, slime-covered planet that hurled its thought-messages from the gravitational focus of a hundred billion swirling stars; others were much nearer, within the very galaxy to which Earth belonged. And out beyond all else, beyond the outmost bournes of stars and worlds, galaxies and quasars, there churned a boundless Force: the mindless, sentient Chaos that seethes at the focus of all existence and gives birth to all things. . . .